[Wikitech-l] Too many random test wikis

Now that 1.19 deploy has been completed, it seems a good idea to discuss about our test wikis. I see the following problems: * No inventory of test wikis exist. There are many and they don't follow any pattern or rule of sort (see appendix). * It's unclear what purpose those wikis have, in particular: if they're permanent, or going to be deleted; if used only by developers or also open to generic testing by users or even as sandboxes/playgrounds ("let's see how sysop tools are"); when and how it's possible to request one (example real use case: "test the translation of FlaggedRevs to Finnish before deploy on fi.wiki"). * As a result, valuable content and activities are either misplaced and not performed effectively (or at all), or lost forever in the end. An example of the latter, which seems the worst problem: https://www.mediawiki.org/?oldid=499749#Feature_requests references a feedback page that got deleted in the meanwhile. The future of <http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Problem_reports> is unclear and the page overlaps with other wikis' purposes, in particular it should be on a permanent wiki and moved to mediawiki.org if only meant for developers/technical users or to <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Problem_reports> if it has the Wikimedia projects' users as audience. I think that we should work on some sort of general policy for test wikis (very simple) to divide them in categories, avoid fragmentation and ensure we empower people to do all they need. The permanent test wikis at least should be easily discoverable from a central place (I've heard of a Wikimedia Labs automatical home page with index, but we need to focus on what's most urgent). In the meanwhile, it doesn't harm if each of us adds the (current or past) test wikis they remembers to this section I created: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_wikis#Test_wikis Nemo == Appendix == Examples of wikis follow (far from comprehensive): * Main ones are https://test.wikipedia.org , https://test2.wikipedia.org * Now we have http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/ and all the related wikis in the form http://af.wiktionary.beta.wmflabs.org but they're not accessible from anywhere, nor explained clearly, nor have an index or any navigation tool. ** Used to be deployment.wmflabs.org ** The situation will get worse with subdomains not following any clear rule like http://education.wmflabs.org * Several Labs wikis have been important for a while, now locked for unclear reasons and with an even more unclear future. ** http://de.labs.wikimedia.org/ ** http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/ ** http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/ ** http://liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org/ (deleted) * A bunch of prototype wikis exist or has existed at some point. ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/release-en/Main_Page ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/deployment-en and so on ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org and so on ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevs ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevs-en and so on ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevsde/Hauptseite ** http://commons.prototype.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/sandbox.6/Main_Page ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/sandbox.3/Main_Page and so on ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/timedmedia/Main_Page ** http://commons.prototype.wikimedia.org/uwd ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/wmde-sandbox-1/